Frank Mento on teaching harpsichord technique

By Vidas Pinkevicius (get free updates of new posts here)

Welcome to Secrets of Organ Playing Podcast #94!

Today's guest is Frank Mento who is an American born organist and harpsichordist currently living and working
in France. He is Professor Emeritus of Harpsichord at the Conservatory of the 18th precinct in Paris and Organist Emeritus at Saint-Jean de Montmartre Church, also in Paris.

He has recently published the 10th volume of the his comprehensive Harpsichord Method. This treatise is especially suitable for organists because harpsichord and organ in early music are very closely related - they are like cousins.

Frank wrote this method because he started teaching harpsichord back in 1992 and there was very little material available for beginners.

There were few methods that were on the market and some had good ideas but they all started from the standpoint that the beginning pupil already had some basic musical knowledge and some basic keyboard technique.

The first two or three pages were easy but afterwards they jumped to difficult things so he had always to add material making photocopies writing in his own exercises to fill these gaps.

So Frank ended up by writing his own method to make something coherent and more easily accessible to people who have never heard of harpsichord.
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Since 1994 this method is being used in 27 countries, covering Europe, North America, South America and Oceania. Frank hopes that he also will get students from Africa in the future.

Frank has already been on our podcast talking about his Vol. 8 and now that this project has been completed it will be great to see his complete vision for students who want to learn early keyboard technique.

Enjoy and share your comments below.

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Listen to the conversation